Being a stay-at-home mother (11 year old, schools, mature, adoption)
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The height of a woman's fertility is at a fairly young age (don't have specifics but you can find them online). So it is "natural" for women to be "popping out babies" in their twenties.
You don't have to do what they do, however . . . march to the beat of your own drummer and don't worry about what other people are doing but do educate yourself about peak fertility so you don't miss out if you want kids.
I have been a housewife without kids for as long as I have been married (five years).
I blame feminism for putting down homemaking as a valid choice. Most people nowadays have no idea at all what homemakers do and assume that anyone without a job is lazy and uneducated. Women are not trained to cook and take care of a home anymore, let alone be a mom. It is all about being as close to a man as possible and rejecting all femininity in order to become "better". Well my mom is a homemaker and is highly educated, so am I. Women are equal to men, but different. Sexism is wrong and women should have the same education and job opportunities as men. I just disagree with the way feminism has gone and wish the movement would have been different.
Men used to tell us to stay home and now women are villifying housewives. It doesn't take a large bank account to raise children: just love, shelter, food and basic clothing and toys that can be bought used. No day care provider can replace a mother no matter how great she is. I understand it works for a lot of families though. And I strongly dislike anyone making rules for when and how a woman should be a homemaker, such as only when the child is a few weeks old or only until all the children go to school. It is none of people's business what my husband and I choose to do. Ironically, it is mostly women I meet who ask me what I do that insult me directly. They seem quite frustrated in their own lives. If they are so happy, why do they feel the need to insult homemakers? I don't care if other women work and wish they'd stop being so rude.
I have been a housewife without kids for as long as I have been married (five years).
I blame feminism for putting down homemaking as a valid choice. Most people nowadays have no idea at all what homemakers do and assume that anyone without a job is lazy and uneducated. Women are not trained to cook and take care of a home anymore, let alone be a mom. It is all about being as close to a man as possible and rejecting all femininity in order to become "better". Well my mom is a homemaker and is highly educated, so am I. Women are equal to men, but different. Sexism is wrong and women should have the same education and job opportunities as men. I just disagree with the way feminism has gone and wish the movement would have been different.
Men used to tell us to stay home and now women are villifying housewives. It doesn't take a large bank account to raise children: just love, shelter, food and basic clothing and toys that can be bought used. No day care provider can replace a mother no matter how great she is. I understand it works for a lot of families though. And I strongly dislike anyone making rules for when and how a woman should be a homemaker, such as only when the child is a few weeks old or only until all the children go to school. It is none of people's business what my husband and I choose to do. Ironically, it is mostly women I meet who ask me what I do that insult me directly. They seem quite frustrated in their own lives. If they are so happy, why do they feel the need to insult homemakers? I don't care if other women work and wish they'd stop being so rude.
1) You don't like generalizations made about homemakers, but you yourself are making them about feminists.
2) Which feminists put down homemakers, and which women are villifying housewives?
3) You do realize there are many feminists who are homemakers/SAHM, don't you?
4) Thanks to feminism you have a great education, and the choice whether to work or stay home.
5) When will women stop belittling each other's choices, and be more supportive of one another?
When will women stop belittling each other's choices, and be more supportive of one another?
I've been thinking about this very thing the past two or three days. The greatest gift we can give to each other, as women, is to support each other. To cheer each other on. To be there for each other.
I've realised I've been very blessed because my friends and I don't care who works and who doesn't. Some have kids, some don't. No one gets put down because they gave up a career to be there for family. We draw on the wisdom each woman has because of her own particular journey.
I'm a sahm, otherwise known as a housewife. I also consider myself to be a feminist. I understand what NYSinger is talking about in her post. In some veins of feminism there is stigma attached to choosing to forgo a career in favor of staying home with the kids (or no kids) and taking care of the household duties. There is no doubt about that. Fortunately there are many different veins of feminism and not all view staying at home in a negative light. Some even view it favorably. NYSinger, I just read a book that I think you would like (based on your post). It's called Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture.
About the Book – Radical Homemakers (http://radicalhomemakers.com/about/ - broken link)
Quote:
Radical Homemakers uncovers a hidden revolution quietly taking hold across the United States. It is the story of pioneering men and women who are redefining feminism and the good life by adhering to simple principles of ecological sustainability, social justice, community engagement and family well-being.
Anyone who "blames feminism" for whatever is a dolt.
The reasons are for change in the world are far beyond something you can sum up in a word. I've noticed that a large number of religious persons in the throwback to the old days homeschool movement have latched onto the "feminism BAD" mantra and use it to cover a multitude of sins (other peoples, of course) withthout having any idea what they are really raging against. They want things to be just so and anything else needs a lable so they can focus on an emeny. It's so stupid.
I'm a liberated woman, a feminist to some I suppose although I've never applied the word to myself. I worked for years, got an education, and was also SAHM for over 20 years because we could afford it so, hey, why not? Work was a PITA once the kids came, I'm not a superwoman and none of us are. They aren't mutually exclusive and there is no reason for women to argue about it. While I worked I had some help from those who didn't, when I stayed home I helped out some people who worked. If you don't know people like that who can give you a hand now and then you are really missing out on the whole human experience.
1) Where did I say I was putting down feminists? I am against feminism, not feminists.
2) Here are some quotes for you:
“[The] housewife is a nobody, and [housework] is a dead-end job. It may actually have a deteriorating effect on her mind…rendering her incapable of prolonged concentration on any single task. [She] comes to seem dumb as well as dull. [b]eing a housewife makes women sick.” ~ Sociologist Jessie Bernard in The Future of Marriage, 1982.
“Housewives [are] an endless array of ‘horse-leech’s’ daughters, crying Give! Give! — [a] parasite mate devouring even when she should most feed [and who has] the aspirations of an affectionate guinea pig.” ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relations Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, 1898.
” We must now say proudly and without any exaggeration that apart from Soviet Russia, there is not a country in the world where women enjoy full equality and where women are not placed in the humiliating position felt particularly in day-to-day family life. This is one of our first and most important tasks…. Housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman…The building of*socialism will begin only when we have achieved the complete equality of women and when we undertake the new work together with women who have been emancipated from that petty stultifying, unproductive work…. We are setting up model institutions, dining-rooms and nurseries, that will emancipate women from housework…. These institutions that liberate women from their position as household slaves are springing up where it is in any way possible.” ~ V.I. Lenin, The Task of the Working Women’s Movement in the Soviet Republic , 1919.
” The chief thing is to get women to take part in socially productive labor, to liberate them from ‘domestic slavery,’ to free them from their stupefying and humiliating subjugation to the eternal drudgery of the kitchen and the nursery. This struggle will be a long one, and it demands a radical reconstruction, both of social technique and of morale. But it will end in the complete triumph of Communism.” ~ V.I. Lenin, International Working Women’s Day Speech , 1920.
“A parasite sucking out the living strength of another organism…the [housewife's] labor does not even tend toward the creation of anything durable…. [W]oman’s work within the home [is] not directly useful to society, produces nothing. [The housewife] is subordinate, secondary, parasitic. It is for their common welfare that the situation must be altered by prohibiting marriage as a ‘career’ for woman.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.
“[Housewives] are mindless and thing-hungry…not people. [Housework] is peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls. [It] arrests their development at an infantile level, short of personal identity with an inevitably weak core of self…. [Housewives] are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps. [The] conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife.” ~ Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963.
“[Housewives] are dependent creatures who are still children…parasites.” ~ Gloria Steinem, “What It Would Be Like If Women Win,” Time, August 31, 1970.
“[The husband's work] provides for greater challenges and opportunities for growth than are available to his wife, [whose] horizons are inevitably limited by her relegation to domestic duties. [This] programs her for mediocrity and dulls her brain…. [Motherhood] can only be a temporary detour.” ~ Nena O’Neill and George O’Neill, Open Marriage: A New Lifestyle for Couples, 1972.
“Women owe Frieden an incalculable debt for The Feminine Mystique…. Domesticity was not a satisfactory story of an intelligent woman’s life.” ~ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life, 1996.
“Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession… The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn’t be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that.” ~ Vivian Gornick, University of Illinois, “The Daily Illini,” April 25, 1981.
“[As long as the woman] is the primary caretaker of childhood, she is prevented from being a free human being.” ~ Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, 1969.
“[A]s long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed…. No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir, “Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma,” Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.
“Feminism was profoundly opposed to traditional conceptions of how families should be organized, [since] the very existence of full-time homemakers was incompatible with the women’s movement…. [i]f even 10 percent of American women remain full-time homemakers, this will reinforce traditional views of what women ought to do and encourage other women to become full-time homemakers at least while their children are very young…. If women disproportionately take time off from their careers to have children, or if they work less hard than men at their careers while their children are young, this will put them at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis men, particularly men whose wives do all the homemaking and child care…. This means that no matter how any individual feminist might feel about child care and housework, the movement as a whole had reasons to discourage full-time homemaking.” ~ Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, 1986.
3) Yes, I do realize that not all feminists are against housewives, and that is cool! The point I am making is that I am FOR women's rights, not for feminism, which is basically a movement that is based on Marxism and has done everything to push moms out of the house and villify men. I know women were not treated well in the past, but treating men like dirt in return is no better.
4) That is perhaps true, but education does not always happen in college. Also, it is no coincidence that feminists like Betty Friedan came out AFTER the Industrial Revolution as most jobs before that were pretty harsh for men like mining and farming.
5) You working moms have my full support. I like feminists that think being homemaker is a valid choice.
6) I do what works for me and you what works for you! Where did you read in my post that I am dictating women what to do? The world would be a weird place is everyone was like me!
Wow, so much misconception from my post. As soon as a woman dares pointing out the flaws of feminism, she is accused of all sorts of wrongs. For the record, I am not religious. Look at the private lives of the radical feminists: none of them had a stable family upbringing. Betty Friedan said it was easier to found a new movement than to take care of her childhood issues (she hates her mother). If feminism had a peaceful leader like Gandhi, I would perhaps rethink my position.
Dorthy: I've heard about this book. I've heard it is about going back to the pre-industrial evolution days of both men and women working on the family farm and living with relatives. Although I adhere to cooking from scratch, I know DH and I could not sustain such lifestyle. It is an interesting concept though as a DIY life can be so rewarding.
I just feel a need to point out the origins of the feminism movement, which was NOT about the valid choice of being a homemaker. Most women think though that feminists were magic faeries that saved women, and I simply cannot adhere to that. I am also neither for the masculinism movement because I believe both men and women are equal.
Nowadays, men's incomes have dimished because there are a lot more workers on the market: supply and demand. Men with blue collar jobs used to be able to support their whole families on their salaries alone, but today, many families need two incomes. Houses were far less expensive as well as they are now based on two incomes. Men still don't help out much with household chores so mom has to not only work, but clean, cook and take care of the children after work. How is that fair? Kudos to the superwomen out there who do it all and very well. I know I don't have enough energy for doing both and am very happy being a housewife.
Dorthy: I've heard about this book. I've heard it is about going back to the pre-industrial evolution days of both men and women working on the family farm and living with relatives. Although I adhere to cooking from scratch, I know DH and I could not sustain such lifestyle. It is an interesting concept though as a DIY life can be so rewarding.
To me the book was mostly about leading a more simple, frugal lifestyle, one that moves away from consumerism and puts an emphasis on community. It's inspiring even though I don't aspire to the same lifestyle of the families that are featured in the book. The sociological and historical aspects are what I found most interesting. Based on your posts, I think you would really enjoy it.
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I had to rep you for this excellent post.